Missing Out Quotes

“Graham Greene “Kayıp Çocuk” başlıklı denemesinde şöyle der:

“Muhtemelen kitaplar yalnızca çocukluk döneminde hayatımızda derin bir iz bırakır. Hayatımızın ilerleyen yıllarında okuduklarımızı beğenir, eğlenceli bulur, onlar vasıtasıyla bazı görüşlerimizi değiştirebiliriz, ama daha ziyade zaten düşündüğümüz şeylerin teyidini görürüz kitaplarda…

Fakat çocuklukta tüm kitaplar bize geleceği anlatan kehanetlerle doludur ve kartlara bakıp uzun bir yolculuk veya boğulma yoluyla ölüm gören bir falcı gibi, gelecekte olacakları etkilerler. Sanırım kitapların geçmişte bizi heyecanlandırmaları bundan kaynaklanıyor.” s.102”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Yozlaşma karşısında azami adaleti sağlayabilmek için kendi masumiyetini koruman gerekir: Değerli bir şeye ihanet edip etmediğinin kendi içinde daima ayırdında olmalısın.” s.106”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The right choice is the one that makes us lose interest in the alternatives;”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“And this discord, this supposed mismatch, is the origin of our experience of missing out, and the origin of engaged political action; as though we believe there is a world elsewhere of what Freud calls ‘complete satisfaction’, and that Camus might call a more just world.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“There is a gap between what we want and what we can have, and that gap, Camus says, is our link, our connection, to the world”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“It became the enduring project of our modern cultures of redemption – cultures committed above all to science and progress – to create societies in which people can realize their potential, in which ‘growth’ and ‘productivity’ and ‘opportunity’ are the watchwords”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives – even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available – because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The wish to know someone – the wish to get it, the person, the poem, the joke – can be the wish to quell, to temper, anticipatory excitement; or even to get rid of our desire for them.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We have to, in Cavell’s language, abrogate the knowing of other people in favour of the acknowledgement of their existence. We mustn’t let knowing do the work of acknowledging; otherwise we can end up disbelieving – that is, being unable to prove – the existence of other people and then of ourselves. Knowing other people, in psychoanalytic language, can be a defence, the defence, against acknowledging their actual existence, and what we need their existence for.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Overinterpretation is getting it with a vengeance. It betrays an anxiety, so to speak, of not being close enough to, not being of the same mind as, the one supposed to know. As though well-being, or even survival, was a function of closeness, and closeness was a function of knowledge (closeness means wanting to be close to those who know, especially to those who seem to know us).”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“But I also want to suggest that we are under considerable pressure to get it; that, in the language of psychoanalysis, it is a super-ego command – one of the most intimidating in what is a horrible repertoire – that dominates our lives: ‘You must get it’ (you must get it in order to qualify as a member of our group). We need to imagine what a life would be like in which this command had been dropped, a life in which there was nothing to get because what went on between people, what people wanted from each other, couldn’t possibly be phrased in that way. Our lives would not be about getting the joke or the point. Or, to put it slightly differently, there would be other pleasures than the pleasures of humiliation.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“When we are frustrated, the unlived life is always beckoning; the unlived life of gratified desire returns as a possibility. Waiting too long poisons desire, but waiting too little pre-empts it; the imagining is in the waiting.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“For modern people, stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives; and by what sabotages the pleasures that we seek. Childhood is a problem because of the effect it has on the adults we are able to become. No one has ever had the adolescence they should have had. No one has ever taken enough of their chances, or had enough chances to take, and so on.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“This is my supposition: we live as if we know more about the experiences we haven’t had than about the experiences we have had. And certain ways of reading aid and abet this strange form of authority – the authority of inexperience, the conviction we gain from not having done things.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Clearly, parents and children want the impossible from each other. This is the tragedy of everyday life. And yet Freud, followed, among others, by Bion, is asking us to imagine something that is seemingly wildly improbable: that there can only be unrealistic wanting, but that unrealistic wanting can only be satisfied by realistic satisfactions; everything else being frustration in disguise, rage and vengefulness, what Cavell calls the murdering of the world. We need, in other words, to know something about what we don’t get, and about the importance of not getting it.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We always have competing wants, they are often incompatible, so in making choices essentials are sacrificed. Lives are tragic not merely when people can’t have everything they want but when their wanting mutilates them; when what they want entails an unbearable loss.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Patoloji şeklinde ortaya çıkan şey kısa süre sonra norma dönüşebilir; yeni olanın şoku ile yeninin patolojikleştirilmesi iç içe geçebilir. Artık herkes delidir ve herkes bir rolü canlandırıyordur; ya da bazı meslek erbaplarının dediği gibi, nasıl ki bazı insanlar kanser hastasıysa bazıları da delidir ve gerçek hayatta rol yapanlar "mış gibi kişilikler"dir, hakiki benliklerine yabancılaşmış, arzuları uğruna zararlı ortamlara gereğinden fazla uyum sağlamış kişilerdir. Rol yapabilmek, özellikle de iyi rol yapabilmek, yabancılaşmanın mı, ustalık ve zorlukları aşabilmenin mi semptomudur?”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The child, like Greene himself, is a traveller; the adult has arrived:”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Anlamamak ve anlaşılmamak insanı mükemmelliğin zorbalığından kurtarır. Bütün zorbalıklar başka birinin ihtiyaçlarını tamı tamına anlama iddiası taşır.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Şayet kendinden talep edilene -aşırı sevgi talebine- boyun eğmeyen Cordelia gibi hüsrana uğratan konumundaysanız, o zaman başka tür bir otoriteye, gerçekçi biçimde verebileceğiniz şey üzerinde bir otoriteye sahipsinizdir: "Efendimizi sevmem gerektiği kadar seviyorum./ Ne daha çok ne daha az" s. 17”
― Adam Phillips , Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Nothing I know matters more Than what never happened. John Burnside, ‘Hearsay”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life